Five things I like right now
Listen
Apple Music just started showing me a new “Discovery Radio” channel. So far I’m getting a lot of downtempo electronic jazz, like St Germain but new. Cool.
Watch
Justified. It’s a little of-its-time (early 2010s), but it’s good, too.
Read
I just finished Kill it With Fire by Marianne Bellotti. It’s about replacing legacy software systems. Bellotti is an anthropologist by training, and though she’s clearly a fantastic engineer, the book is really about change management.
There are three or four fundamental concepts that were new to me in Kill it With Fire that I will be wheeling out for clients from now on.
Eat
Been so sick recently that I’ve just been making easy things with lots of veggies.
Think
Most organisations operate on deductive reasoning. They know what they have, they know how those things are arranged, and they know what outcome that produces.
The building blocks are things, arrangements and outcomes.
Most “design thinking” operates on abductive reasoning. Compared to deductive reasoning, the equation is reversed. There’s a desired outcome, we know something about the arrangement of the situation, and we’re trying to come up with the things that, when suitably arranged, produce the desired outcome.
It turns out that coming up with new things is hard and surprisingly expensive.
But there’s another way to think about things. Inductive reasoning, uses the same building blocks, but it’s the arrangement that we create, not the things. That is, we know the outcome, we know the things we can use, but we have to come out with a way to make use of them to achieve (or explain) the outcome.
I’m increasingly convinced that most of the time, most organisations need inductive problem solving, not “design thinking”.